Former Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner indicted over currency trade that lost billions

Cristina Kirchner, the former president of Argentina, has been charged and had her financial assets frozen by a court over a currency trade which lost the country billions of dollars.

It is the first charge to be levelled against Ms Kirchner, the rabble-rousing, anti-British former leader who divided Argentina into passionate supporters or avid detractors of her highly personal style of leadership.

She is accused of overseeing an operation by the central bank to sell “dollar futures” - contracts to sell the national currency, the peso, at a future date - at an artificially low price in the final months of her presidency last year.

The charges levelled against the former president, her economy minister, the former head of the central bank and 12 members of its board do not make clear who is thought to have benefited from the trade.

But they allege that it was carried out following direct instructions from Ms Kirchner to the minister, Axel Kicillof.

The case is not the first that Ms Kirchner is facing. She has also been named as a suspect in a corruption and money laundering case involving a friend of her husband, Nestor Kirchner, her predecessor as president.

However the charges laid against her in this case bring closer to reality her prediction that she would end up in jail, made to supporters when first summoned to a hearing last month.

New president Mauricio Macri promised to lift exchange controls when he came to office Credit:
Mario Tama/Getty

“They can call me 20 times. They can lock me up, but they won’t make me stop saying what I think,” she told a cheering crowd of supporters. In court, she refused to answer questions, limiting herself to a written statement accusing the court of an “abuse of judicial power”.

But the dollar contracts were priced without taking that likelihood into account. The losses were estimated at USD5 billion when the currency did indeed fall overnight from 9.8 pesos to the dollar to more than 13 pesos.

The judge, Claudio Bonadio, ordered $1 millon of her assets to be frozen as he considered the case further.

Ms Kirchner believes that Judge Bonadio, whom she tried to sack while she was president, is pursuing a political vendetta against her. In her speech last month, she said that she and fellow Latin American leftist leaders were being persecuted by a “media, political and judicial matrix”.

Dilma Rousseff, the leftist president of Brazil, was impeached by her country’s parliament last week and forced to stand down pending a prosecution being brought.

Mr Kiciloff has also ridiculed the case against him as “an absurdity” and “wholly political”.

They and their supporters also say that the case is in part an attempt to divert attention from Mr Macri’s economic reforms, and from revelations in the Panama Papers of links to offshore companies, including one founded by his father.